Although there are many free online services that can cloak your affiliate links, using standalone cloaking software is still important so you can fully control link cloaking operations. Nothing can beat the functionalities of cloaking software so you better get one to protect your links and ensure the profitability of your online affiliate business.

Cloaking software has the capability to customize your affiliate links. With free online cloaking services, you are only limited to making your links shorter. But with a cloaking application, you can tweak your affiliate link and make it look like a standard URL or sales page link.

This capability is critical because it can have a big impact on your click through conversion. Online buyers usually click on a link that looks like a real URL. Essentially, you can convince more people to follow your links by using cloaking software.

Tiny URLs generated by free online services are sometimes banned by some ISPs. Some web services and email providers are also wary of tiny URLs generated by free services. So if you are going to use this cloaking method, there is a possibility that you can encounter issues or problems with ISPs and web service providers.

You can avoid all of these by using cloaking software. Developers of cloaking applications ensure that your links will be friendly to ISPs and spam filters. Because of this, you can avoid issues with ISPs and email providers. Your affiliate links therefore will become effective tools in bringing in big commissions for you.

Tired of that nasty affiliate link? Want to higher your conversion rates? Then you need to encrypt your cloaking software once and for all. The process is easy and really works. Get serious about your affiliate marketing sales and go to http://www.cloaknrotate.com now!

Will you believe me if I tell that most websites you visit have a log where they record and keep your internet protocol address? Through this, they can send cookies into your computer. These cookies are able to gather your personal information and also trace your activities online. I call this invasion of privacy because it is done without your permission. If you are someone like me who does not like this sort of invasion, you would want to mask your IP address. This article will tell you how to go about this.

Your IP address is all you need to surf around the web. It is your unique identity that helps you connect with websites and other people online. It is usually assigned to you by your ISP. Anonymous internet browsing means hiding this unique address whenever you are browsing. This will keep cyber criminals at bay from accessing and stealing your personal information. Learning to mask your IP address is therefore important in order to surf anonymously.

Some believe that by enabling private browsing on their browsers they can be safe online. Even most believe that their anti-virus software can protect them online. I have realized over time that this is not so. What I later got to know about being safe online is to mask your IP address

Online shoppers are the most at risk to an exposed IP because they share their financial details online. If your id is not hidden, then hackers can easily have field day on you financial details and other personal data. Therefore, shoppers should be more discreet about their information by anonymously surfing the web.

The most ideal solution to this is by installing IP-changing software on your computer. The application does not interfere with the normal running of your computer or the speed of your internet; it works in the background keeping your safe by masking your IP. You can visit any website without leaving any trace of your presence. It works by replacing your real address with a dummy one which reflects on any website you visit.

Another interesting feature of the IP-changing software is that you can customize it to your taste. You can choose the location you want yourself to appear in whenever you are online. You can also ask the application to change your IP at regular intervals. Surprisingly, this very useful tool is very cheap to get from any reliable software vendor.

Dear affiliate marketers, are you aware of affiliate link theft, or affiliate link cloaking? Here I am going to explain the problem of affiliate link theft and it’s only solution.

What is affiliate link theft?

Let me explain it with the example. Suppose your affiliate id is 123, and hence your product link would be something like www. Site.com/?id=123, right? So if visitor to this link purchase product, you will get the commission (to the owner of 123 id), right? Now suppose if buyer replaces your id with his own id, what will happen? You will loss the commission. This is what I call the affiliate link theft.

How to protect your online marketing business from such theft and frauds?

Only way you can protect your links from such a commission fraud, is to smartly hide your link from them. You can replace your whole link with link on your own domain. Then you will simply redirect the sells page smartly to the vendor website, not giving the change to replace your affiliation id.

How to do Affiliate Link Cloaking?

Well, doing it manually will require technical programming skill and lot’s of time setting up to link cloaking program. You can also try automated software or link cloaking service from 3rd party to save your precious time.

Is Affiliate cloaking is legitimate? We must use it?

If I have to answer is one word, the of course “Yes”. As there are many other benefits of link cloaking as I explained below. It saves your commission loss and protects you from affiliate frauds.

1. Your links is converted to more readers friendly url like www. your-domain. com/product/link.html. It converted to your domain, and not the vendor’s domain, so it gives the impression like you own the product. It helps create trust between you and buyers.

2. Another benefit is you can track your sells on your own way. If you higher 3rd party service or software, they also offer smart tracking system with advanced link tracking algorithm.

I hope you understand the need of affiliate cloaking for getting success in online marketing business. Comments and feedback are welcomed.

So – you’ve built a great sales page, you’ve signed up to your affiliate program, a couple of days pass and you check your stats. Terrific – growing visitor traffic but – where’s your commission? Something’s wrong! Nada! Zilch! What’s going on?

Well, chances are that visitors have sussed out that yours is an affiliate link, gone direct to the vendor, and bypassed you. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. You’ve done the work of alerting them to the features and benefits of the product, you’ve done the search engine optimisation, you’ve gained good page ranking but none of this will benefit you.

So – why does it happen, and what can you do?

This short article will explain what link cloaking software is, what it can do, and why you should consider using it.

First, many affiliate URLs are plain ugly, containing a string of unintelligible gobbledy-gook, and people are suspicious of web links that look, to the untrained eye, fishy. Moreover, there are quite a few people who, for whatever reason, don’t want other to benefit from their purchase, even though it doesn’t cost them any money at all. It’s a weird psychological realty. So they will go straight to the censor – in the example I’ve given – and make their purchase from there. Result? You lose your commission.

But suppose there was a legitimate way of concealing or masking that link? Wouldn’t that make a difference? Of course it would, especially if the link had a much more positive ring to it such as “james gladwin recommends this product”? (I’ve removed the url formatting, by the way.)

There’s no way that the potential buyer can identify the vendor, and what’s more, the link appears professional and slick.

That is what link cloaking software does. It allows you to mask the original affiliate link and substitute another that reads differently but still links to the affiliate host sales page.

So, how do you set about cloaking your links?

Well, there is a cheap way that I wouldn’t recommend because someone who is determined enough can use Right Click View Page Source and identify what you are trying to conceal – so I won’t spend time going into that.

The best way is to buy link cloaking software that you upload to your server. Now – don’t panic: it’s not complicated and these days, if you have access to cPanel, it is very straightforward and the software will come with detailed instructions which often include videos. comply Google “link cloaking software” and you will have plenty of choice, from free to paid versions. Personally, I believe it is worth paying a few dollars. Of course, there are also some membership sites that offer really good link cloaking software as part of the package.

Once set up, you will have access to an html page with a series of text boxes where you enter the web address you want visitors to be directed to, your own server address, and specific text that is relevant to the product that you are selling. Click enter, and the cloaked or masked web link is generated. This is what you paste into your sales page.

If you are serious about affiliate marketing, I would urge you to investigate link clocking software. You won’t regret it.

If you’re getting started in affiliate marketing, you may have heard people talking about affiliate link cloaking and perhaps been wondering if this is something you should be doing as well.

There are several arguments for someone to cloak their links,

1. Affiliate link hijacking – occurs when someone uses their own affiliate link to purchase a product. Lets say, for example, that you read about a product on my site and click the link to the product’s main site to check it out. You then decide to buy the product, but you copy the information in the URL and then substitute your own affiliate link in place of mine. When you use the new link to buy the product, you get the commission instead of me.

2. Affiliate link bypassing – occurs when someone simply removes the affiliate link to go directly to the product’s main selling site. Some people do this because they do not want you to get the commission.

3. Affiliate link condensing – some affiliate links can be long, ugly, and uninviting, which can cause some people to avoid clicking the link. Many people will recognize an affiliate link and will not click on it because the do not like being sold to, or only view it as a sales pitch. You want as many people to click your link as possible so if you have a link that looks something like this, [http://www.productsite.com/affiliatepage.asp?affid=prodaffid4653], you would cloak the link to look something like this, http://www.yoursite.com/productsite, to make it appear more inviting.

How to cloak your links

There are several ways to cloak your links and there also exist various pieces of software that will generate cloaked link pages for you. However, I do not recommend link cloaking software because doing it manually is really quite easy and does not require a lot of HTML experience.

The easiest way is to create a framed page that points to your affiliate link. To do this, create a blank HTML page with the usual html, head, and title tags. Then create a frameset tag right below the head tag and add a frame tag nested within the frameset tag. Include a src attribute within the frame tag that includes your affiliate link.

Here is a simple example of what a cloaked page should look like (I’ve removed the angled brackets to prevent the tag names from being parsed out of this article):

html

head

title – TITLE OF YOUR PAGE – /title

/head

frameset

frame src=”YOUR AFFILIATE LINK”/

/frameset

/html

This page will display your URL and page title with the affiliate page.

One other method you can use is a link cloaking service, such as tinyurl. These services will take any URL and create a redirect for them using a shortened URL (usually related to the service’s main URL. E.g. tinyurl/productsite). This may be desirable if you are marketing an affiliate product and you do not yet have your own web host. But if you use this method, be aware that some ad sites and pay-per-click programs do not allow you to use a redirected URL such as those offered by link cloaking services.

Should you cloak your affiliate links?

Now that you know the problems facing affiliate links and how to cloak them, you may be asking yourself if you should in fact use this method.

Some marketers may consider the use of cloaked links dishonest – they feel that if they have a good enough relationship with their customers and develop a high level of trust, people will not have any issues clicking on the original affiliate link (this really only works for email marketing). Others simply feel they are optimizing their marketing and protecting their sales; to get as much possible returns for their efforts as possible.

There really is no correct answer. In the end, you will need to decide if affiliate link cloaking is the best approach for your business.

About the Author:
Sean Kenaston is an Associate Editor at Ratings Hub – the first and only ad and affiliate link free site that provides 100% user-based reviews of various Internet marketing products and services. It is absolutely free and it’s the only place on the Internet offering completely unbiased feedback on products used by every type of marketer, from beginner to guru and everyone in between. Please visit http://www.ratingshub.no-nonsense-marketing.com

Masking your affiliate links (Affiliate Link Cloaking) is a very important exercise to do if you are selling affiliate products on your website. First, majority of affiliate links are generated by computer, so they mostly are quite long and ugly and you may want to change these to short nice looking cloaked links. Most important, however, is to save yourself from affiliate commission hijacking, especially when you are selling a product not only to general public, but to other online marketers as well.

I’ll show you what happens when hijackers see your affiliate link to the product they want to buy. Lets assume you are promoting a ClickBank product. Your affiliate url will look like this when you mouse over it:

YourAffiliateID.ProductID.hop.clickbank.net

So, if a person is also a member of ClickBank he is very likely to copy your link instead of clicking it, then paste it to the address bar and change your AffiliateID to his. He is then getting your commission which means that he’s basically buying a discounted product and you are getting nothing.

A very nasty thing to do, yes, but it happens and very often. Same with any other affiliate program, not just ClickBank. Even worse when a person simply removes your affiliate id, without being a ClickBank affiliate himself, just to leave you with no commission for the sale. There are people who do this just out of jealousy. So, it is quite important to cloak affiliate links. Following are the best 3 free methods to do it.

Free Affiliate Link Cloaking – Third party affiliate link cloakers!

The easiest and most widely used method to hide and shorten your affiliate links is by using free cloaking services provided by third party websites. They will create a folder at their domain, which will be redirected to your original affiliate link. It takes a few minutes to create a link and your new link will usually look something like this:

where [something] is the name of the service
and [yh349d] – randomly generated letters and numbers

There are many to chose from, so it’s not a problem to google one with domain name that you will like.

However, there are certain disadvantages of this method:
# First, you don’t have access or control over their hosting or internet provider, so if their website is down your links will also become broken, and in most cases you won’t notice until you click the link yourself.
# Additionally, the links are also computer generated and will usually look like the example above and will have nothing to do with the provided product, so it will be hard to remember these for your visitors.

Here are some of the most famous third party affiliate link cloaker services for you:
TinyUrl.com
KlasLink.com
MoveTo.ws

Affiliate Link Cloaking using HTML

This method is also used by marketers very often. However, you need a domain name and hosting to do this. You can still use some free hosting though. This is also a good option for those whos hosting doesn’t support PHP scripts, but HTML only.
The disadvantage of this method is that sometimes users disable “meta refresh” in their browsers, so instead of being redirected automatically they will have to click manually and will be able to see your affiliate id when they mouse over the link on your hub page. It’s very very rare though.

To use this method you need to create a html document with Meta Refresh tag (for exact codes go to website in Author Box below) named REDIRECT (or whatever name you choose) in your websites’ root folder (or any other folder). Then just use a link to this document as your cloaked affiliate link on your website.

For example:
[Http://www.yourdomain.com/redirect.html]
or [Http://www.yourdomain.com/otherfolder/redirect.html]

Affiliate Link Cloaking using PHP

This method is similar to HTML one. But its much quicker and much less code. (Again, for exact code go to website in Author Box Below) Use this if your server supports php scripts.

Basically, follow same steps as with the HTML method, but instead of creating a html document create a txt file and rename it to redirect.php
Then just use a link to this file as your cloaked url.

Affiliate Link Cloaking using PHP and URL REWRITE

This is a more advanced method that allows to cloak multiple affiliate links to different products using one php file. However, it involves making changes to your .htaccess file. This file is usually situated in your websites root folder. If you don’t have one, then i suggest you google it to know what it is and how to use it.

You will need to create a link.php file with a list of your affiliate links and give each link a unique ID. Then you will also have to add 2 lines of code to your .htaccess file.
Then if you need a cloaked link to one of your products you just use:

The author of this article (Sergei Petrov) has been promoting affiliate products since 2005 and strongly recommends everyone involved in affiliate marketing to use affiliate link cloaking techniques to protect their commission from hijacking.

Affiliate programs are a rapidly growing sector of the online business world. These programs offer benefits for both parties involved – but how do these programs work? Read on for an explanation of what affiliate programs are, how they work and how you can get involved in one yourself.An affiliate program is a pretty simple concept, although it can be complex to implement. An affiliate program is an agreement between a company which has a product or service to sell (this company is called the merchant in the context of affiliate programs) and a website owner who is willing to market the products or services which the merchant offers – this person is known as the affiliate.

The Affiliate Merchant Provides Links and Banners

The merchant provides the affiliate with a link to use on their website which directs visitors to the website of the merchant; if the visitor makes a purchase, the affiliate is paid a commission on the sale. These programs are beneficial for the affiliate, since they have an opportunity to make money while putting in as little or as much work as they like. The merchant is able to essentially have any number of sales personnel who are paid strictly on a commission basis, making affiliate programs an incredibly cost effective form of marketing for any business with an online presence.

So depending on how savvy an affiliate is about internet marketing and of course, how appealing of a product or service they are marketing, there can be a lot of money to be made in these programs.

How to Begin Affiliate Marketing

But how can you get involved in an affiliate marketing program and begin reaping the rewards they can have to offer?

The first step is to find an affiliate program which appeals to you and sign up for their program. Demand is the first thing you should look for when trying to decide on an affiliate program – if there doesn’t seem to be a market for the product or service offered, it’s likely not a good bet.

Look for an affiliate program which offers a very competitive compensation model, meaning that the time and effort you put into your affiliate venture will be well compensated; something every aspiring affiliate likes to hear.

As mentioned before, the merchant will provide affiliates with text links and ad banners for use on their site which will direct visitors to the merchant’s website. These links and banners contain the user ID assigned to the affiliate; this is to make sure that commissions can be accurately tracked and paid.

Where to Place Affiliate Ads

You’ll want to place ad banners in a place which is conspicuous but not TOO conspicuous. Don’t let your zeal to earn commissions turn off visitors to your site and send them elsewhere. Text links should also be placed where people can find them, but not presented in such a way that you come off as only interested in selling to them – there is an art to this, which can be learned by practice (there are also some good guides on link and banner placement available online – do some research and go with what seems the most sensible arrangement to you; you can always fine tune things later).

Since it is possible for people to bypass the link tracking system and even make a purchase via your page using another affiliates ID, many affiliates use a technique called link cloaking. There’s no time to go into detail on link cloaking here, but there are a number of different ways to protect your affiliate links from this kind of poaching.

Affiliate Commissions

Your commissions will be tracked by the merchant or a third party contracted by the merchant and are usually based on the amount of sales you have managed to bring in for the company, although there are programs which pay on the basis of other criteria as well.
Affiliate programs can be a very lucrative extra source of revenue – and if you are willing to put in the time and effort marketing an affiliate program, it can even become your main source of income!

Affiliate Advertising

There are a few ways to do this; one is natural search engine optimization, which consists of using relevant keywords (the words and phrases which people type into Google and other search engines when they’re looking for something) in the content of your site – this will make your site much more easy to find when someone looks up, for example, “video conferencing”.

You can also use pay per click (PPC) advertising, which are the small text ads displayed alongside lists of search engine results; this is a very cost effective way of getting visitors to your site, since you only pay when someone actually clicks the link and comes to your site. These visitors are already interested in what your site is about, meaning that they are far more likely to go on to the merchant’s site and make a purchase.

There is a lot more to know about how affiliate programs work and more to the point, how to make them work for you. Hopefully this brief guide has given you enough information to get you interested in this exciting and growing industry.

One particularly popular affiliate program is offered by iLinc, a provider of webinar and video conferencing software. This makes a good choice since there is an increasing demand for these types of services by companies small and large, as well as by many entrepreneurs and sole proprietorships. The iLinc affiliate program [http://www.ilinc.com/partners/affiliate.php] is administered by Commission Junction, which handles tracking and disbursing affiliate commissions for iLinc. In their affiliate program, affiliates are paid monthly for the referrals they have made to the iLinc web conferencing software solution.

So you’ve decided to become an affiliate marketer and you’re ready to earn your fair share of the millions paid out in commissions every year.

You’ve signed up for the program (or programs) of your choice, got your affiliate link ready and now the first answer you want to know is: “Where to place my affiliate links?”

Very good question.

Where you place your affiliate links is going to have a lot to do with your affiliate marketing strategy. It’s best to decide on one strategy to start with and then build on that as you have gained experience and maximized the profit there.

The following points are a few of the many affiliate marketing strategies you can use to place your affiliate links in key positions online that will help you earn great commissions.

1. On Your Website

Of course you should be adding your affiliate links where appropriate on your website. This can be in full blown product reviews, in casual mentions of products, on a recommended resources page, in a list of learning materials, in your footer, etc, etc.

2. On Your Blog

Blogging is a great way to make money as an affiliate. It is much like using a website but you can also get feedback and find out what people are most responding to. Make sure to pay attention to the kind of posts people click and read, then write more of them.

3. In Your Email Signatures

If you’re like many people you send hundreds or even thousands of emails monthly. Put this to work for you by recommending a relevant product in your email signature.

4. In Pay Per Click

If you are brave enough to try pay per click marketing then you may want to buy domain names and redirect them to your affiliate link. This is a method I don’t use myself as it’s easier and cheaper for me to get my traffic through natural search engine optimization and place my links on my own website. If you do use this method keep in mind you will not be building a list either. It’s better to get the traffic to your website, build your email list and then send them on through an affiliate link.

5. In Special Reports

Special reports are somewhere to place your affiliate links that is not often thought of. It’s also very effective. If you write up very useful reports and then place thoughtful recommendations into those reports you will be appreciated for your work and approach. People want to buy products that are going to help their business and a well thought out report that helps them grow their business makes the purchase a no-brainer.

6. In Emails

Now you must be building an email list. If you plan on building a sustainable business online then building and writing to an email leads list is so important. Build in relevant affiliate offers using your links and you’re sure to increase commissions.

By signing up for the report above you will get affiliate marketing tips that teach you how to build a passive income that pays your return on investment for years to come. This has nothing to do with ‘get rich quick’ and everything to do with leverage and smart marketing.

So you’ve decided that you want to get your hands on a link cloaker, have you? Considering the amount of buzz that link cloakers have been generating of late, it is no surprise if you have. To be honest, using link cloakers is almost a ‘must’ nowadays for any affiliate marketer who wishes to really make the most of the efforts that they’re putting into generating sales. Sadly, knowing that you want an affiliate link cloaker is one thing – but when it comes to actually selecting one you’re going to find yourself faced with many, many different options.

And the question is – which one should you choose?

For the time being, just forget about all the options arrayed before you and ask yourself this one simple question: What do you want a link cloaker for?

Are you only interested in cloaking your links, period? Are you interested in exploring the many other ways that link cloakers can help your affiliate marketing? Are you interested in anything and everything that could improve the sales that you obtain from your affiliate marketing? These are the kinds of questions that you need to ask yourself because they’re going to form your basis for selecting the best link cloaker for your purposes.

If you’re simply interested in cloaking your links, then any option you choose would probably suffice. Be sure that the link cloaker you opt for actually does fully cloak your links, not only in their outward appearance before they’re clicked, but also in the address bar of your potential customer’s browsers after they have been clicked. So long as the link cloaker that you choose can accomplish that – you’re all sorted!

Assuming you want to delve deeper however, you’re going to discover the wealth of different opportunities that exist for you when you have a link cloaker in your hand. To get started, focus on whether or not you want a link cloaker that allows you to obtain a cookie while redirecting to a website that is entirely of your choosing. This may be accomplished through double redirects or other methods, but it is essentially the means that will allow you to bypass tired old affiliate product sales pages, and employ your own devastating marketing tactics instead!

And if you want to go even further, you could then check out the myriad of different options that various affiliate link cloakers have to offer. Some have tools to allow for easy usage, others have 404 redirects that are fully customizable, while yet others even allow pop ups to appear so that you can maximize the gains you obtain from each and every visitor.

Whatever the case, the idea that you should be focusing on is the fact that you need to select the best link cloaker based on what you actually want to get out of it. Go ahead and delve into the options arrayed before you – no matter what you want, or what you intend to attain, there should be a link cloaker that’ll help you do just that!

Tempting as it may be, the fact of the matter is that free link cloakers tend to come hand in hand with several disadvantages. Although these cloakers have certainly grown in popularity by leaps and bounds, they still are lacking in terms of certain features and more often than not the disadvantages that they contain could actually mean that you’re going to end up worse off should you use them. So despite the fact that there are free link cloakers out there, you should thread with care unless you want to end up falling victim to the downsides they possess.

One of the biggest disadvantages of free link cloakers is their popularity. Nowadays, everyone wants to cloak their links, and although a fair number of people want to do so for legitimate reasons, there are still quite a lot of people who wish to cloak their links for other, less savory, reasons. Some of these links would contain things such as adult websites, negative links, or even links to malicious websites. All things said and done, this has served to give many free link cloakers a bad name, and ruined their reputation.

Also, it is the reason why many free link cloakers actually end up getting shut down after a short span of time.

Yet another downside of free link cloakers lies in the fact that the links you obtain very often turn out to be far from permanent. Thus, if you intend to rely on these links, you’re going to find that from time to time you need to update them so that they don’t end up simply dying on you one fine day. Worse – if your links actually do end up dying on you, you may never actually find out about it until much later!

All things said and done, free affiliate link cloakers really do carry a hefty price. Sure, they might cost you absolutely nothing to use, but you’re going to end up paying one way or another when they actually collapse and take all your links with them. Frankly, the question you need to ask yourself is whether or not it is really worth risking the loss in sales in order to save a few dollars by using a free affiliate link cloaker.

More importantly, you should also ask yourself how much you trust the person running the cloaker, and whether or not there is a chance that they will actually alter your links to serve their own affiliate id! In all seriousness, this is a situation that many marketers have found themselves victim of in the past!

Remember this: Nothing is really free. Despite the fact that free link cloakers may seem to be attractive, they do have an ugly side and now that you know about it, you should know well enough to steer clear of them as far as possible. Of course, not all of them may end up suffering from these disadvantages, but once again: Do you really want to take that risk?